If you just read HN, you'd think React is losing some of its weight in the community. However from my experience out in the day to day world (which is largely

If you just read HN, you'd think React is losing some of its weight in the community. However from my experience out in the day to day world (which is largely outside Bay Area Silicon Valley), this is not the case. Indeed, HNers and forward thinking devs here were the first comers to React, largely. I know I was on it pretty early (and walked a way more than once!) but the reality is its just picking up major steam in other places, the so called 'shadow developer' communities, like large .NET shops that when I talk to them at conferences, desperately want to move away from Angular, and React is often a choice (Vue is gaining steam here too. I think this second order of developers will decide how big each get, IMO). Through that lens, its amazing they're taking these steps to find the balance between 'magic' (auto imports!) and lessening the syntax you have to learn as you grow development. There are so many shops, in enterprise in particular, full of 'shadow' developers most of us never meet or hear about, that are hungry for this kind of thing. Angular has some foot hold here, but Microsoft has been keen on trying to give alternatives, one of which is React (and MS here still has a lot of weight) and I think React will have staying power and growth by making itself more appealing to these kinds of developers. These are the kinds of devs who still use jQuery in 2020 (not that its bad! I swear I don't think that outright), even for new projects. There's a ton of the web ecosystem that has not and does not develop with these things in mind. I have witnessed this with hooks. Hooks made React more approachable to development teams I worked with because class components had an unintended side effect - Developers made all of the logic encapsulated by the component inside methods - where extracting functions would have been easier to test and been far more modular - simply because thats OOP to most devs (right or wrongly). So you'd end up with 10K line classes that do all kinds of byzantine things with extremely tight coupling. With hooks, functions become the pattern, and the library (can we just call it a framework already?) really molds the developer into best practices of extracting components and using component composition. Basically, if you aren't just looking to reach the HN crowd, these changes are great. Thats been my experience so far. React has been growing in popularity at places I've worked and other developers I know see this too (many of which develop at consultancies, PHP/Wordpress shops, .NET shops etc) because of the change of paradigms as well as stability, of course, have made it much more maintainable. This says very little of the overall web ecosystem, which still has a major churn problem (same for the ecosystem around React, too much churn and breaking changes, over minimal upsides, I've observed) Since I'm rambling, I wonder what React would look like if Web Components V1 was a thing when it first came out.